(ANSAmed) – ROME, MARCH 21 – Intense cultural, artistic and social dialogue between the two sides of the Mediterranean is once again at the centre of the 18th “Festival du Cinéma Méditerranéen”, which is being held from March 24 to 31 in the Moroccan city of Tetouan, a crossroads between Europe and North Africa. Italy will have a key presence at the event. The Italian Festival Medfilm (the organiser of the festival of the same name in November, which is also in its 18th edition) has produced a selection of Italian cinema for the event. The festival features the Official Competition, the Panorama section and encounters with a number of international guests, but also has space this year for a tribute to director Daniele Luchetti, one of the most important and widely-loved Italian film-makers abroad, with the screenings of his two last films: “My Brother is an Only Child” and “La Nostra Vita”, which saw Elio Germano win the Palme d’Or for Best Actor at Cannes in 2010.
The Italian Cinema Days in Morocco, a scheme devised by the MedFilm Festival, are part of the protocol of intent signed by the president of the MedFilm Festival, Ginella Vocca, and the secretary general of Morocco’s Ministry of Culture, Redouane Belardi, for the promotion of Italian cinema in a key country for the Mediterranean audiovisual market, as well as the promotion of Moroccan cinema in Italy.
As well as the tribute to Daniele Luchetti, Italy also features in Tetouan with a raft of contemporary films and authors. In competition for the festival’s prize are two of last season’s best pictures: “I am there” by Andrea Segre (who won the 2011 edition of the MedFilm Festival) and “Kryptonite in her bag” by Ivan Cotroneo. Also featuring are works by Francesco Patierno (“Cose dell’altro Mondo”) and Antonietta De Lillo (“Il Pranzo di Natale”) in the Panorama section, a mixture of new and old that confirms the vitality of a certain form of Italian cinema, which can still provide new and original ways of looking at the world today.
The Tetouan festival, which pays tribute to the democratic aspirations of Syria, has 12 feature fil ms in the running for the Official Competition (from Serbia and Greece to Italy, Morocco and Algeria), 14 short films and 12 documentaries. The special sections and tributes are rich and varied, ranging from Luchetti to Sandrine Bonnaire and from Mohammed Ismail to Hicham Rostom.
The artistic director of MedFilm, Ginella Vocca, says that “at the present time, which is marked by movement that is profoundly changing the geopolitical equilibrium of a vast and nearby geographical area, Europe’s challenge is to be close to these changes, to dialogue with its “new” neighbours to acquire “new” ways of interacting with the political and social factors that each of these countries expresses as part of its individuality, but remaining aware that we are dealing not with a single entity but with a variety of cultural, social, political and religious elements. We Europeans make the easy mistake of imagining a single Maghreb, where, fortunately, diversity is in fact commonplace. Just like in Europe, in the whole of the Maghreb, up to the Middle East, each country is going through its own crisis, with its periods of silence, introspection, and of searching for new instruments with which to relate to its history”. (ANSAmed).
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